Psychedelics, Meditation & Enlightenment - Part 2
Art by Jade Wade
For a long time now, I’ve been fascinated by the possibility that ordinary humans alive today are experiencing reality in ways that resemble reports from mystics of the past. That this is even possible tends to be a contentious claim, evoking strong reactions ranging from the aggressively skeptical to the dogmatically narrow, with strongly held views of what these experiences mean and how words like ‘awakening,’ ‘enlightenment’ or ‘realisation’ should be used.
So, in questioning whether psychedelics could play a role in attaining persistent shifts in this direction, it is no surprise that opinions and emotions range equally - from the enthusiastic “yes” to the resounding “no”.
Whilst scientific research in this specific area is still almost non-existent, my aim is to help move this conversation forward by surveying some of the most thoughtful responses to the question, especially from people with lived experience of meditation, psychedelics and non-ordinary states of mind, and those in contact with individuals engaged in this.
In Part One, I attempted to flesh out the range of experiences I’m referring to using a secular framework. In summary: a range of persistent perceptions that bear resemblance to peak mystical experiences or flow states of performers, but without the hyper or hypo-aroused nervous system, such as the elevated heartbeat of someone in ecstasy, or the imperceptible breath of a meditator in trance. These experiences are reported as an ongoing state that lasts for days or decades, don’t depend on individual circumstances and integrate with normal everyday functioning. The intensity can range from a background peace or bliss, to the more dramatic loss of any individual sense of self - an undifferentiated merging of awareness with one’s surroundings. If you’re curious about more specifics, or the evidence for this being a real thing, you can catch up with Part One here.
So do psychedelics help or hinder? Are they most often door openers, training wheels, guides or in fact risky distractions from more reliable methods of transforming consciousness?
The least controversial claim is that psychedelics can induce at least temporary experiences which often convert skeptics to the possibility that persistent shifts might be possible. This doesn’t mean accepting that they are useful, worth seeking, or have anything to say about what is objectively true. But for many, profound psychedelic experiences become the catalyst for a lifetime of exploration and the discovery of traditions that offer practices and perspectives aligned with the insights glimpsed during their psychedelic trip.
Many of the most well-known spiritual teachers in the USA attribute the beginning of their journey to the psychedelic experience, including Ram Das, Deepak Chopra, Jack Kornfield and Joan Halifax. In preparing this overview, I likewise encountered countless examples of people who used psychedelics very early on in their journey, before embarking on explorations in which they hoped to attain or integrate the realisations that they felt woken up to.
“When you eventually see through the veils to how things really are, you will keep saying again and again, ‘this is certainly not like we thought it was!’”
Yet despite the prevalence of this result, it is far from guaranteed. Roland Griffiths, Professor of Neuropsychopharmacology of Consciousness and lead researcher at the Centre for Psychedelics and Consciousness at Johns Hopkins University, believes that context and preparation are of utmost importance. “When we consider the millions of young people who got exposed to psychedelics in the 60s, it was only a very tiny fraction that were drawn into meditation and going off on a path of seeking” he says. Psycho-active substances do not guarantee a mystical-type experience, especially not a positive one, and for most people, without a conceptual framework, the experience may simply be “put in a box, and forgotten about.” Oncologist Slawek Wojtowicz-Praga agrees; without adequate context, “I suspect that what happens is just entertainment, people see visions, and without proper context, their lives do not change.”
Although recent neuroimaging research indicates strong parallels between very advanced meditators and individuals on a psychedelic trips (such as the decrease in the amount of activity in structures of the brain associated with self-reflective thought - the ‘default mode network’), there is as yet little indication that repeated psychedelic trips build the kind of structural changes in brain functioning seen in long-term meditators.
“From an organic point of view, for the deeper brain connections to be integrated, most psychedelics are just way too short” says Daniel Ingram, Emergency Room Physician and author of ‘Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha’. “Even, Ibogain which is super powerful and lasts a long time, 36 hours is not a lot of time for dendrites to grow. You may have a lot of increased connectivity, and changes in the way neurons wire together and stuff...it's still not as deep as the super formal big structure changes that come from formal meditation.”
In fact, the very power of these substances may lie in their capacity to destabilise existing patterns, which, when applied to people stuck in a cycle of addiction or depression, can be a life-saver. Thought of as a ‘reset button,’ in therapeutic contexts this is seen to open up space for new perspectives and behaviours.
This is partly why the same substances that can be helpful where there is mental rigidity are potentially harmful in cases where there is not enough order, such as personality disorder or schizophrenia. Equally, this destabilising quality may prove counterproductive for people who are experiencing recent progress through methodological practices like meditation, chanting or contemplation. Newer neural pathways are easily disrupted.
Mike Crowley, Author of Secret Drugs of Buddhism
Having said that, many believe a well-timed psychedelic trip may confirm certain insights, and open new possibilities for an individual’s personal practice. Mike Crowley, author of ‘Secret Drugs of Buddhism’, believes that psycho-active substances have been leveraged for centuries. In line with these traditions, he typically advocates an initial practice of meditation for a year before a person’s first trip, as they aim to become adept at letting thoughts pass without grasping or aversion, or even have them subside entirely. Without this capacity, the psychedelic experience is likely to confuse, beguile and even be counterproductive - the ecstatic highs and sudden certainty can end up inflating the individual ego as opposed to deconstructing it, as well as perhaps distracting from the long term goals.
“The risk is you chase these special experiences'' says Jules Evans, author of Breaking Open - Finding a Way Through Spiritual Emergencies. “You feel spiritually high for a few weeks, flooded with meaning, but this gradually wears off.” When ordinary life resumes, feelings of emptiness and depression may return, and it's common for people to go and seek a new rocket boost. If it was ayahuasca last time, people may try a kambo next, or holotropic breathwork, or conscious sexuality. “It becomes a form of spiritual tourism, a spiritual holiday.”
The seductive allure of ecstatic experiences exists regardless of how they are induced, and is warned against in countless spiritual traditions. “If they are accessed by persons who are unprepared for them,” says religious scholar Huston Smith in his book ‘Cleansing the Doors of Perception' “one of two things will happen. Either the subject will be damaged, or the significance of the experience will be missed and the encounter trivialized. The psychedelic movement pays lip service to these dangers by advising screening and preparing subjects, but on the whole it honors the esoteric/exoteric distinction only perfunctorily.”
Yet there are many who insist a well-timed psychedelic trip can renew faith that there is indeed a reason to meditate, that there is a deeper perception of reality worth seeking. Nicholas Saunders, in his book Ecstasy and the Dance Culture recounts meeting with a Soto Zen monk who considered MDMA a wonderful tool for teaching. “I had a very keen student who never succeeded in meditation until Ecstasy removed the block caused by his own effort when trying to meditate. That one experience helped him to make fast progress, and he has since been ordained a monk." Another Rinzai monk concluded after much personal experimentation that MDMA was “most effective on the second day of a seven-day meditation,” but that otherwise, there was a risk of being distracted by blissful sensations.
Philosopher Ken Wilbur agrees that psychedelics can combine well with meditation, allowing access to certain states not available by doing either alone - and the more altered states you experience, the more likely they will help you transform. But eventually, the mind has to learn to get there without help. “The downside comes from people that only use psychedelics or drugs. I’ve found that over the years, they just become mean. Somehow, it just closes them down. You keep doing it and you keep doing it and it doesn’t quite cause the transformation. It can cause a peak experience, but generally not a transformative experience.”
Despite similarities in brain scans, it's an ongoing question how alike psychedelic experiences really are to the ongoing and deep states of long-term meditators. Daniel Ingram believes that there are experiences accessible through meditation far deeper than those even of powerful substances like 5-MeO-DMT.
When Ekhart Tolle, author of “The Power of Now’ was asked how his LSD experience related to the state of mind he habitually experiences, his enthusiasm was subdued. “It doesn’t really raise your consciousness, it simply amplifies sense perceptions.” He believes typical feelings, like of the whole world “being alive” are equally accessible to anyone that takes the time to deeply notice their surroundings in the present moment. Whilst the psychedelic may make this easier “it's not quite the same thing, because what I experience is much more subtle and beautiful.” Ekhart experienced LSD as “almost a violent thing, where sense perceptions become so magnified there was no room for thinking anymore. I could see why some people say it's a glimpse of what it means to perceive the world without this continual interference of mental noise. But I wouldn’t recommend it.”
Equally, Ken Wilbur considers psychedelics as useful only with the right instruction - enlightenment being the realisation of awareness as the fundamental truth underlying any experience, regardless of the state of mind. A psychedelic trip can be useful not because it causes the enlightened mind, but because “it makes it harder to avoid the utterly obvious fact that you are aware.”
Steve Taylor, of Leeds Beckett University and author of The Leap likewise reports a lack of evidence for psychedelics as the main contributor to what he calls ‘wakefulness’. After investigating over 100 individual cases, “I didn’t come across anyone that used psychedelics as an ongoing tool towards awakening.” Researcher Jeffrey Martin studied 319 individuals reporting what he calls ‘Persistent Non-Symbolic Experience, (PNSE) or ‘Fundamental Wellbeing,’ and found that approximately 52% of participants had used hallucinogenic drugs at some point, but none reported these as the trigger that caused a permanent transition. “The majority of participants had practiced a variety of forms of meditation or contemplative prayer, for anywhere from 3 days to 52 years prior to experiencing PNSE. Approximately 14% of participants had never meditated or practiced any form of centering or contemplative prayer.”
It's worth remembering there are no longitudinal studies comparing psychedelic use with meditation or other practices, and probably a lack even of anecdotal evidence given the fact many psychedelics remain illegal or taboo. In researching this article, I interacted with many people who, because of their jobs and public roles, preferred to remain anonymous. One person said that their experience for the last three years has been one of “equanimity, joy and compassion” - mainly due to meditation, but that psychedelics helped them “explore and to be with all the energies and conditions which are deep within the body/mind from inter-generational and developmental traumas.” For him, they played a role in integration and understanding. Using the kind of paradoxical language familiar to mystics, he believes there is “nothing to get to,” and that whilst the experience arises and passes, “Suchness remains unmoved.”
Whilst the spectacular experiences that psychedelics can induce are tantalizing, and their therapeutic potential increasingly confirmed by scientific research, these conversations are incomplete without acknowledging the potential dangers.
“There really are risks - I wouldn’t want anyone to misunderstand that,” says Roland Griffiths, in a podcast with Sam Harris. If not taken in a safe context, people can become terrified and put themselves and others in danger. “They can run out into traffic, people can jump off cliffs, or jump out of windows, it does happen. There are homicides and suicides that can occur. It's a low probability, but it does occur.” In a large survey study of almost 2000 describing their worst experience from psilocybin,11% reported putting others or themselves at risk for physical harm, 3% sought medical help. Of the same group, 10% reported “adverse psychological symptoms lasting more than a year, with 8% seeking treatment.” (It's worth noting these statistics are not a population estimate, they are from people anonymously recounting their very worst experiences.)
Roland Griffiths, Centre for Psychedelics and Consciousness Research, Johns Hopkins
This is the second risk Griffiths’ takes into account; people who are vulnerable to developing psychosis or schizophrenia, especially during their late teens and early 20s, which is the most probable time for onset of such disorders. Whilst evidence for psychedelics being the cause is circumstantial, there are reports of people who attribute the onset of their psychosis with taking psychedelics, which, says Griffiths, is “a lifelong nightmare from which there is no simple recovery. So that’s a very important cautionary note.”
Finally, some have cautioned that psychedelics may even hinder long-term development of access to self generated mystical states. “The question is: are these dumbing down your own centres in your brain?” asks Daniel Ingram. “Whilst it might have given you an initial taste, maybe you’re getting more resistant to your own brain chemicals that moderate these things.” Daniel points to the fact that the same dose of psychedelics on two consecutive days is unlikely to be as powerful on day two. “There is a receptor downgrade response that happens, so the question is, are you just desensitizing yourself so your own chemicals don’t work so well?” This is partly why they are not considered classic drugs of abuse. “In fact, if one takes them repeatedly, they become tolerant to their effects,” says Roland Griffiths, “that is their effects reduce.”
Ram Das echoed this concern, believing that whilst psychedelics gave him an initial boost, their powerful impact on his system actually slowed down his later progress, “making my work slower and harder for me, at the advanced level. It didn’t ruin my chances… it just made that work more difficult.”
Before concluding, there is perhaps merit in questioning the whole quest for enlightenment. Neuro-scientist Dr James Cooke has been studying perception, consciousness and altered experiences through meditation and psychedelics after a spontaneous mystical experience early in life awoke him to their possibility. “If you'd asked me in the past I might have said the self was an illusion to be transcended” he says - that if one can identify with ‘pure being’, you can move beyond the somewhat false sense of separation. But his view has since softened, when he recognised much of the desire to abide permanently in such a state was a result of unconscious trauma. If sufficiently healed, one can learn to move towards the absolute when necessary, whilst living day to day “as an embodied creature that has its own sense of self, knows how to navigate the world, doesn’t take itself too seriously.” He maintains that psychedelics can play a role in both glimpsing the absolute, and healing the relative. “But ultimately, you need to have that foundation of concentration - awareness cultivated through meditation - in order to really pick apart what is relevant from these deeply altered states.”
Like many I spoke with, I look forward to a time when more formal research can confirm or deny these many hopes and concerns. After countless conversations with seekers, explorers and adventurers, my personal feeling is that with favourable conditions, there is a place in these enquiries for psychedelics for some. I would caution against disrupting progress made in other ways, or getting trapped in a “revolving door” of repeated trips, in which neither transcendence nor ordinary life are integrated. I would very rarely recommend them as an initial approach, as there are so many other practices that can be surprisingly powerful on their own. Whilst even meditation is not without risks, more resources are emerging to help those who find the effects distressing. Meditation is generally more gradual and predictable, and is almost universally recommended as a tool for managing and integrating both good trips, and bad. After all, if someone can’t sit through the temporary boredom and frustration of an hour of meditation, what chance do they have of peacefully integrating the potential terrors that are possible during a trip?
Ideally, in future, initiates to this realm will enjoy abundant access to guides, a conceptual framework to contextualise their experiences, practices to integrate them, and a community of co-explorers with which to share and compare wisdom. There is still much yet to be discovered! Motivated by this vision, we’re launching a series of conversations with mystics, meditators and psychonauts. You can join the first of these, with Daniel Ingram, in a whirlwind tour through his vast experience, expertise and extraordinary mind.
I look forward to having you join!
